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New York Stock Exchange

by
sdubois
Contributions
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Published on
Aug 13, 2010 04:45 PM

NYSE Euronext Inc. operates multiple securities exchanges around the
world, most notably the New York Stock Exchange. We spoke with CIO Steve
Rubinow and asked him about using free software in this demanding
environment.

"Exchanges like the NYSE and Euronext are very processing intensive
industries. The NYSE stands at the pinnacle of this industry. We process Millions of
transactions per second with microsecond latency.

What we have found is that intense transaction rates with low latency
are supported by using free software. Although cost is important to us and we have saved money,
our reason for using free software is that it is the best solution for
what we are trying to do. The whole industry is moving this way. We have
used various forms of proprietary Unix and decided after a while to move
to GNU and Linux. We have also found that many of the vendors that
we work with were writing their programs with this platform as their
priority.

Our needs are unique, so the freedom to adapt or change the software is
important, but only in minor ways. What is essential is that the
software we are using is well supported, and it is.

We use many other free software utilities and develop utilities
in-house. One example is Puppet, a server automation and configuration
tool we use.

We also look to employ people who have a background in free software and
we train others to use it. There are people in our organization who are
attuned to the free software community's efforts and who participate in
such projects."